“Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.”

But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.

For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.

In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‘superlive,’ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.

No longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

What if you gave someone a gift, and they neglected to thank you for it – would you be likely to give them another?

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

To speak another language is to have another soul